I've been testing SXCE builds in VirtualBox on my Mac for a few months, just to get experience on using another major Unix. What are your opinions on SXCE and Solaris (not the OpenSolaris distribution)?

Personally, I like SXCE a lot in that it's a Unix with great integration and an amazing set of built-in applications. It requires little work to get a desktop setup (of course, my post-install script for FreeBSD automates this too), and it applications that cover day to day use. It's basically a preset system like Mac OS X, which is what it excels at. If you want customization, then you won't find it here.

mmm.... solaris is a bit old for me, the only good repository that works with is blastwave but even blastwave has sometimes old programs .... and another problem for me is that you cannot install the system under a zfs partition. So if you need zfs to run linux applications you have to save space for a zfs partition at install time...

on the other hand SXCE is very nice, it can be installed in a zfs filesystem, has updated libraries and you can use SFE (spec-file-extra) to get a lot of other updated programs...
sxce has always been stable for me, but i do not run a server, so i do not know how much it can be stable under heavy stress, they say to use solaris in production environment.

my fear is that sxce will be replaced with opensolaris, it seems to me (i hope to be wrong) that sxce will be an os used only to compile ON sources for opensolaris, while the most of everyday packages will be compiled for opensolaris only and added to opensolaris IPS repositories. I do not know if they will ever use IPS under sxce.

Here are some screenshots of my desktop running SXCE 98. I really like Solaris for how low maintenance it is in comparison to Linux. BSD and Mac OS X are equally low maintenance. I also like Solaris's sound system, even though it's just a souped up version of vanilla OSS that BSDs use. It basically turned my Dell 2.0 system that I use in FreeBSD into a decent sound system. I could actually hear bass! Anyway, I'll have some more points, but if I didn't have BSD, I'd be using SXCE.